Y'all won't believe the shit we did way back then...

We made a news portal using semantically correct HTML and CSS.

It's true, we're not shitting you. And it was a big deal.

The year was 2005. Website layouts were made using tables. Whaat? Yea, at that time, browsers were so primitive that tables were the only way to go if you wanted to create anything marginally more complex than just headings, paragraphs and images.

If you wanted to force a column to be 345px wide, you had to put in the invisible pixel (https://spacergif.org/) and set it to desired width. Websites were full of them back then. We optimized for speed, so we named them _.gif (which saved us a couple of Kb).

It looked like CSS would be a promising solution, but all we had was a draft version of CSS v2.1. Browsers started implementing CSS support but it was terribly broken and highly opinionated.

Still, it was something. We just got this gig to make a news portal for a newspaper that was about to be launched. We did our feasibility study (not), weighed all pros and cons (not), and confidently decided to build it using this fresh technology that will surely be a cornerstone of the future web.

It was hell.

Once we implemented every hack in the book (and invented a few in the process) to make it work as we wanted across browsers, we figured some users use Macintosh, and they shouldn't be left behind. Ok, we'll find a Mac, and do this last bit. So we did. When we tested it on Internet Explorer v5.02 for Mac, it broke down completely. We cried. Literally.

Still, we did it. It was one of the first (if not the first) content-heavy news websites in Europe made with the technology that was experimental at the time, and which is the cornerstone of the web as we know today.